I've created a monster.

This one easy trick that makes you look like a terrible parent in public.

This afternoon, on our way home to put Frankie down for a nap, we ducked into a cafe to grab some lunch. The place was packed, but luckily one table was free. We sat down and ordered. Trish then noticed Frankie had done a poo and whisked her off to the dunnies for a quick change in time for our food to arrive. No big deal.

Everything was going swimmingly from that point. The drinks were good, the food was good, life was good. Not even the love child of Nostradamus and a Bulgarian gypsy fortune teller could’ve seen the stick heading for the spokes of our proverbial wheel.

And then it happened. Frankie went red. Her face scrunched, grunting like a gold medal weightlifter deep in the clinch. All signs indicated she had another shit on deck. Already? How can that be? Well that can be because this was no ordinary poo, as all of a sudden, like the town crier announcing that the King was dead, Frankie stood up on her chair and screamed at the top of her lungs:

“POOOO! I POO! I POO! I POO! I POO! I POOOOOO!”

The sudden severity of the declaration she’d crapped her dacks caught us both by such surprise that we started pissing ourselves laughing. I mean what else can you do? The problem was that there was a reason she was so distressed. It was obviously a bit of a ‘bad poo’ that’d caused some serious devastation down there. I can only imagine it must’ve been something like the morning after I put way too much habanero sauce on my burrito.

To the onlookers in a packed-to-capacity cafe, their quiet Saturday arvo avo smash and chai lattes were suddenly disrupted by a screaming, crying toddler in complete meltdown. Being laughed at by her parents to the somewhat discordant soundtrack of “I POO! I POO! I POOOOOOOO!”

I felt like I was in a panopticon. A perimeter of judging eyes staring me down. Like a skinhead wandering through a tour group at Anne Frank’s house. The woman opposite us looked at me with a sneer as potent as the time her son Pythagoras brought home a friend who went to public school.